Tango (4 page)

When Michael Hunter joined our group, he became her pet, or at least that's how it seemed to me. He was an aggressive go-getter and had the chaotic energy of a boy, albeit one who knew how to charm adult women. I knew how to charm adult women too, but my charm lay more in my ability to emulate and match their energy; his charm was more courtly and exasperating.

I didn't like Michael's mother at all—she was loud and mean and not very pretty. When we would play at his house she would yell a lot. I didn't like people who yelled, and I wasn't used to it. My mother didn't yell very much, but she could turn on a dime. Most of the time she was a lot of fun; she could be very silly and affectionate. I loved it when she took me shopping and let me help her pick out her shoes. But there were times when she turned mean, seemingly for no reason, and I couldn't rationalize or explain to myself why. I had a theory that aliens periodically came and stole my real mother and replaced her with this horrible look-alike. After a certain period of time, I became used to the nasty look-alike and would just wait until my loving mother came home.

 

 

MICHAEL'S PARENTS SEEMED LIKE ALIENS TO ME. His mother yelled too much and his father kept
Playboy
magazines hidden in their living room, as I discovered one day when Michael and I were horsing around. We knocked the chair over and
a
Playboy
slid out from under the cushion. My mother had told me
Playboy
magazines were sinful and exploited women; my dad added that most of the women who were in it were probably drug addicts and had no choice but to pose naked to support their habits.

I thought it was strange that Mr. Hunter kept his
Playboy
magazines in a chair in the living room. It didn't seem like a very good place to hide anything. My Pop-Pop kept his
Playboys
in a three-foot stack next to his easy chair. Pop-Pop was my dad's stepfather. He had married my grandmother, who was twenty-five years his junior, when my father was in his early teens. He moved the family to Hagerstown from the small town that they lived in further west in Maryland near the border of West Virginia. My father's parents divorced when he was three years old, so he was raised by his maternal grandmother, his mother, and his best friend's mother, who was a widow.

My father had no clue what a father's role was supposed to be. Pop-Pop already had a son and wasn't particularly interested in my father,
but when I was born, he doted on me, indulging and encouraging all of my artistic endeavors. I never stopped dancing, and I walked on my tiptoes imagining that I was in high heels, which he thought was very funny. He called me “twinkle toes” and we were very close. My cousins on my mother's side told me he was going to go to hell because he hadn't accepted Jesus as his personal lord and savior. Pop-Pop said it was good enough to be nice, which was a lot more than most Christians were. I couldn't argue with that.

Pop-Pop was one of the nicest people I knew even if he had a stack of
Playboys
next to his chair. He took me shopping every week and gave me a dollar to buy anything I wanted. I always bought Barbie coloring books and he didn't bat an eye. I figured if he could buy
Playboy
, I could buy Barbie.

In spite of any comments my mother may have made on the subject, Pop-Pop and I had an understanding. Sometimes my parents would drop me off at his house for him to babysit me, and I can assure you I looked at every single page of every single one of those
Playboy
magazines
while Pop-Pop smoked his Tiparillos and drank his Duke Pilsner. The whole house smelled like cigar smoke and nothing had been changed since my grandmother's death from multiple sclerosis a few years before. There were so many pictures of her that you couldn't turn your head without having her look back at you. The glass in front of the portraits had smudge marks over her lips where my grandfather had kissed her good night every night. It was sort of gross, all that lip skin building up over the years, but still it was touching and wildly romantic. Pop-Pop probably thought I was looking through those magazines because I was fascinated by the bunnies. In fact, I was looking to find any little glimpse of a naked man. I couldn't understand how a magazine about sexuality could be so devoid of any representation of commingling but I guessed, knowing how stupid men were, that they would get jealous if someone else was in the picture to interrupt their fantasy.

Having
Playboys
made my grandfather seem cool to me. He was in his eighties and a widower—those Playmates were the only ladies he
had to keep him company. Mr. Hunter, on the other hand, was married. Surely, lusting after those girls in that magazine was disrespectful of his vows to be faithful to his wife. At least that's what I was told. He also had a flattop, which was definitely not in fashion in the early seventies.

 

 

AT THE END OF THE FIFTH GRADE, WE GRADUATED from being Webelos to become Boy Scouts. It was at that time we had to choose which Scout troop we wished to belong to. It seemed that most of the boys who I liked, including my friend Jay, were going to join Troop 34 at the Methodist Church downtown. The Scout leader was my father's doctor. Even though we went to the Church of the Brethren, my father had been raised a Methodist and felt like this would be a good troop for me. I joined. As soon as school got out, I found out we were all going to Boy Scout Camp, which was not something I was particularly excited about. I didn't want to be at a camp for an entire week with just boys.

We all had to have physicals in order to go to Camp Sinoquipe and since our leader was a doctor, we had to stand in line as he sat on a folding chair in the recreational hall of the church and drop our pants in front of him so he could feel our testicles and make sure none of us had hernias. I don't remember him checking for much else (and I don't think this would happen today: the Scout leader fondling the entire troop's balls) and we all passed our physicals and were sent off to camp. I had just turned eleven years old.

On the first day, even before our parents had left, we had to take a swimming test before we would be allowed to swim in the deep part of the lake. We had to swim from the dock to a buoy and back. I had no interest in swimming in the deep part; I just wanted to play in the water close to the shore. I knew how to swim but I was not a confident swimmer, and I didn't want to have to take the test while everyone was looking. My father insisted that I do it. I argued and we had a terrible fight. He threatened to spank me and take me home if I didn't do what he said, so I
dove into the cold mountain lake and began to swim.

In June in the mountains, lake water has pockets of warmth and then very frigid areas, so the temperature is constantly changing as you move through it. I got about three-quarters of the way to the buoy and my muscles froze. I started to go under. I was angry and scared, and the lifeguard had to come and fish me out. I was so upset with my father for forcing me to do something that I knew I couldn't do. And to make matters worse, my father was upset with me because his boss's son was the lifeguard who had to rescue me. He'd never live that one down. I was completely embarrassed and knew full well that because it was the first thing the other boys had seen me do, I was in for a rough week. Fortunately Jay was with me and his father wasn't there to force him into the same embarrassing situation so I had someone to play with in the shallow water. By the end of the week I took the swimming test again and I made it with no trouble. Jay did, too.

JAY AND I WERE TENT-MATES. I WAS PEA GREEN with envy because he had pink swimming trunks. I was pretty sure I couldn't get away with pink swimming trunks but because his last name was Floyd, everyone began calling him Pink Floyd and he was immediately cool.

Michael Hunter didn't really have a best friend in the Scouts so he ended up being tent-mates with a creepy reprobate whose name I can't remember. I do remember looking over at his tent and seeing Michael sitting on his bunk with that guy standing in front of him waving his dick around like a helicopter. I was glad I wasn't in Michael's shoes.

Across the way from our tent, Michael's older brother Bobby and another boy from the neighborhood, Johnny Stottlemyer, were setting up camp. Jay and I went over to see how they were settling in, and for some reason, maybe it was because I had seen that creepy reprobate waving his dick in front of Michael Hunter's face, or maybe I just wanted to see what I could get away with, I started shouting, “We want a show! We
want a show!” as if Bobby Hunter and Johnny Stottlemyer were a couple of strippers and Jay and I were some dirty old men. I don't know how I knew about such things, maybe I saw something somewhere on TV or maybe it harkened back to Kim Bell's go-go boots, but I knew that if I said the right thing I'd get those boys out of their clothes. I also had a suspicion that they were old enough to have pubic hair, and I was fascinated by pubic hair, seeing as I had none yet.

“We want a show! We want a show!” Evidently that was the right thing to say because after some coaxing those two thirteen-year-old boys were dancing naked, to my supreme delectation. I don't know what Pink Floyd felt about it all. He might have been a little bit shocked!

Later that night, when the sun had gone down, I slipped out of my tent and crept over to where the older boys were camping, in search of a more private show of my own. They seemed more than willing to give me one. It didn't take nearly as much coaxing this time. I got a lot closer and asked if I could touch their pubic hair. Bobby
Hunter's was soft and downy whereas Johnny Stottlemyer's was black and wiry. I liked Bobby's pubes a lot better. Both of their cocks were hard and I had never touched a hard penis like that before. I was fascinated by the heat and the feeling of the hardness under their skin. I touched them for a while until they began to giggle, then I ran back to my tent, then back to them. It was a game of cat and mouse, me going back and forth, until finally I had enough and decided to go to sleep.

 

 

THE NEXT DAY, I VAGUELY RECALL WORKING ON getting some merit badges, one in basket weaving, the other in citizenship. I don't remember my days at Scout camp very clearly, but I know I returned to those boys' tent the next night. Although it seemed very silly, much like a game to me, there was something dangerous and exciting that urged me back there. They were a few years older and seemed much bigger than me, but I felt that I had some sort of power over them. They were very excited, and insistent.

As it turned out, Bobby had a crush on a girl named Alice, so I asked him what he would do if I were Alice, and I told him he had to call me Alice, and imagine that I had boobs and long blond hair. At the time I didn't know any technical terms for anything sexual. I'm not sure he knew much more than I did. He was much more interested in what I might do to him as Alice than what he would do to me.

He started out with instructions like “touch it,” “play with it,” “hold it,” all of which I did. Then he said, “Kiss it.” I wasn't about to do that. I was much less interested in Johnny, but felt that I should at least be fair and do the same to Johnny just so he didn't get mad or have his feelings hurt. I had them very worked up, and they were making lots of noise. Finally a Scoutmaster came to their tent to find out what all the fuss was about. I quickly hid under Bobby's cot. When they had calmed down and the Scoutmaster had left, Bobby said, “Blow me, blow me.” I had no idea what that meant, so I began to blow on his penis. I blew on it and played with it for a while until he started making low groaning
sounds. Then some juice shot out of his dick and got all over my arm and chest. I had no idea what it was, but as soon as it happened, I ran out of the tent and made my way in the dark to a faucet they had in the woods for us to brush our teeth and wash ourselves. I splashed myself with the cool water, but no matter what I did I couldn't get the sticky stuff off of me. It was as if I had walked through a spiderweb. For some reason I was scared. When I got back to my tent, I lay in my sleeping bag in the dark feeling that I had done something wrong, that I had sinned, and I didn't know what to do about it. I remembered that in Sunday school we'd been taught that if we had sinned we had to ask forgiveness from God and the person whom we had sinned against. So I prayed for forgiveness from God, but I couldn't figure out for the life of me whom I'd sinned against.

 

 

FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK, JAY, MICHAEL, AND I hung around together, even though I didn't like Michael. He seemed like one of the few people
I could relate to, maybe because I knew he was staying in that tent with that crazy kid flopping his dick in his face. Michael kept repeating this rhyme while we walked through the woods: “Tom, Dick, or Harry, who should I marry? I'll marry Tom because Tom's dick is Harry.” We would laugh uproariously.

That stupid poem had tremendous resonance for me because I was only interested in Michael's brother—I wanted to check out his pubic hair. After Bobby came on me I never went back to the tent. I had been overcome by guilt, and I didn't want to get sticky again. The entire experience at Boy Scout camp felt like a test that I had to pass, but I couldn't understand why I had to be there. Even though I was constantly being placed in settings and situations because I was a boy, it never made sense for me to be in them because I never felt like a boy.

I wrote a postcard to my Pop-Pop saying that I was having a good time but that the neighbor boys were teasing me. I never felt judged by my Pop-Pop. I trusted him and felt that I could communicate
what I was feeling, having just turned eleven.

When I got home I was still troubled and confused by what I had done in the tent. Part of me wanted to just forget about it, but I was deeply concerned that it was going to cause me to go to hell. My grandfather asked me what I meant when I had written about the boys teasing me. I told him it was nothing. Evidently he had shown the postcard to my mother. My mother asked me about it one day, taking me by surprise. It wasn't something I wanted to discuss with her. Any time I talked about being teased, her only advice was, “You just shake your fist at them and you tell them, ‘Bug off creep!'” which obviously wasn't very helpful. And in this case, I certainly didn't want her to take up the issue with the boys. I just wanted to forget about it and pretend that nothing had ever happened.